38
2016
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
JUST SAY PLEASE a review by James W. Clark, Jr. David Payne. Barefoot to Avalon: A Brother’s Story. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2015.
North Carolina State University Professor Emeritus JAMES W. CLARK, JR. spent his childhood in rural Warren County, NC,, where he was very active in the North Carolina 4-H program; his continued service was recognized by the 2011 North Carolina 4-H Lifetime Achievement Award. He has served, increasingly so after his retirement in 2005, on various boards and in many communities and organizations. Currently he is the President of both the Paul Green Foundation and the North Caroliniana Society. Read more about James W. Clark in an interview in NCLR 2003, and read his interview with William Price, talking about Reynolds Price, in this issue and the 2016 print issue. North Carolina native DAVID PAYNE has written five novels, most recently Back to Wando Passo (Harper Collins, 2009). A UNC Chapel Hill alumnus, he has taught at Bennington, Duke, and Hollins and is a founding faculty member in the Queens University MFA program. Read more about him on his author website.
There came a day when David Payne’s big little brother George A. outran him from the family’s fabled Four Roses cottage at Nags Head to the storm damaged Avalon Pier at Kill Devil Hills on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. This foot race provides the title of this intentionally disturbing, confessional memoir published in 2015 as Barefoot to Avalon: A Brother’s Story. Another reversal, one more poignant than George A.’s beating David to Avalon, brings the new book to its conclusion. David’s young son Will assumes the role of an adult and suggests to his tipsy daddy that he should say, “‘Would you mind taking your lunch box out of your backpack, please?’ instead of ‘Take your lunch box out now!’” (286). Stunned, David follows the advice of his kid who is fed up with command after command, especially drunken ones. So David also says please to Grace, his daughter. This simple strategy is so successful Daddy does not know what to make of it. He writes, “Is saying ‘pretty please’ the secret of the universe, the one I’ve somehow missed?” (287). David Payne has, in fact, missed very little, even though much of what he has experienced is sordid and depressing, beginning early with his Prufrockian father Bill and well-connected mother Margaret in their world of mirrors. He calls the resulting family sickness “hostile dependency.” In other words, “the weak and sick and injured depend upon and hold the strong ones hostage, and the strong ones, in the name of goodness and self-sacrifice, help the weak and disable them entirely” (226). Most people would be too ashamed to write of family troubles so candidly. Payne’s Henderson, NC, family trees, his brother’s death in a suspicious truck accident on I-81 in 2000,
his varied love affairs and first marriage, for instance, are hardly balanced by his excellent education in New England and Chapel Hill, followed by his eventual careers as writing teacher and the author of five semi-autobiographical novels. Four of them – Confessions of a Taoist on Wall Street (1984), Early From the Dance (1989), Ruin Creek (1993), and Gravesend Light (2000) – become richer achievements with Barefoot to Avalon as background. Payne’s intensity of style and deft character development in fiction and nonfiction consume the reader, who may put any of these books aside to reflect, ponder, and relax. Writer and reader become overwhelmed. For example, the spree of creativity that led to Payne’s completion of the “bag of rocks” that became Confessions lasted from September 1 until Christmas, 1982 – fifteen weeks of privation and often frigid work at Four Roses at Nags Head. He had not known before that such a state existed. It felt, he writes, “as good as love and conveniently does not require the presence of another” person (205). During this binge of writing he left the real world and did not find it easy or even want to come back to reality. He later likened his state of being to the hypomania from which George A. suffered personally and professionally from time to time before his tragic death. During the fall of many years, this family inclination, like alcoholism and suicide, was in season for both brothers as it had been for their father. Intensifying it all, George A.’s very troubled adult life ended while he was helping David move back to North Carolina from Vermont in November, 2000.